MAN THE INTERPRETER OF NATURE. 199 



at the time, and which have come to be so in virtue of its whole 

 previous culture. Who, for example, could refuse to the marvel- 

 lous aptitude for perceiving the relations of numbers, which dis- 

 played itself ill the untutored boyhood of George Bidder and Zerah 

 Colburn, the title of an intuitive gift ? But who, on the other hand, 

 can believe that a Bidder or a Colburn could suddenly arise in a 

 race of savages who cannot count beyond five ? Or, again, iu the 

 history of the very earliest years of Mozart, who can fail to recognize 

 the dawn of that glorious genius, whose brilliant but brief career 

 left its imperishable impress on the art it enriched ? But who 

 would be bold enough to affirm that an infant Mozart could be 

 born amongst a tribe, whose only musical instrument is a tom-tom, 

 whose only song is a monotonous chant ? 



Again, by tracing the gradual genesis of some of those ideas 

 which we now accept as " self-evident," — such, for example, as 

 that of the "uniformity of Nature" — we are able to recognize them 

 as the expressions of certain intellectual tendencies, which have 

 progressively augmented in force in successive generations, and 

 now manifest themselves as acquired mental instincts that pene- 

 trate and direct our ordinary course of thought. Such instincts 

 constitute a precious heritage, which has been transmitted to us 

 with ever-increasing value through the long succession of preceding 

 generations ; and which it is for us to transmit to those who shall 

 come after us, with all that further increase which our higher culture 

 and wider range of knowledge can impart. 



And noAv, having studied the working action of the human 

 intellect in the scientific interpretation of Nature, we shall examine 

 the general character of its products ; and the first of these with 

 which we shall deal is our conception of tnatter and of its relation 

 to force. 



The psychologist of the present day views matter entirely 

 through the light of his own consciousness : his idea of matter in 

 the abstract being that it is a "something" which has a permanent 

 power of exciting sensations ; his idea of any "property " of matter 

 being the mental representation of some kind of sensory impres- 

 sion he has received from it; and his idea of any particular kind 

 of matter being the representation of the whole aggregate of the 



